With the emergence of broadband cellular wireless services, mobile network operators now have the ability to address new market opportunities for data services. Unfortunately, these networks have evolved with “lightweight” mobile equipment in mind and not with the possibility of delivering full-featured wireline replacement services. For enterprise customers to adopt wireless wide area network (WWAN) technology, they need improved management capabilities and visibility to their network elements similar to the capabilities that they have in wireline networks.
Cellular networks are designed to handle situations where there is a temporary loss of connectivity with mobile equipment. With the integration of cellular communication capability into network routers for interface to a WAN, it is desirable to notify the cellular network when the network router experiences a fault, such as a power supply failure or software crash, and can no longer service the WWAN interface.
Mobile network operators offering data services to end customers need to manage base transceiver station resources efficiently when a wireless router is active on the mobile network. This is challenging because the on-demand nature of data services requires the base transceiver station to allocate resources for the wireless router even when data are not present or when the wireless router has failed. The base transceiver station cannot distinguish between a temporary loss of connectivity or wireless router failure, resulting in the wireless connection with the wireless router being kept open until a timeout occurs. In the absence of a notification and with the eventual loss of the cellular connection, the cellular network service provider and customer will not know why the connection to the router is lost and how to fix it.